Description

The playfield is represented by a ring, on the inside of which are thinkers, stickmen who produce ideas and knowledge, which pop out of their heads and float into the Commons.

On the outside of the ring, the "market" area, are consumers, who can produce no ideas of their own and must have their heads fed by a sinister machine which revolves around the outside of the ring, exercising a gravitational attraction on free and loose ideas inside, scooping them up, commodifying them and maintaining its dominion over the consumers.

The player exerts influence over this system through the mouse icon, a copyleft logo, which can vaguely nudge idea bubbles near where they need to go (the heads of thinkers -- who decline and flip over to the outside of the ring and become consumers if forced to pontificate in a vacuum) and away from where they shouldn't go -- into the ravenous maw of the machine. If one can successfully play "keep-away" with the idea-harvester, the consumers on the outside of the ring will starve for stimulation and similarly flip over back to the inside of the ring. The game is won when the entire population resides in the Commons on the inside of the ring.